If Haile Selassie, whom some remember as a bit of a biker from his days of exile in the West of England, had been stretched to 6’3” and given a part in Easy Rider, he would have...

The typical tidal range, or difference in sea level between high and low tides, in the open ocean is about 2 ft(0.6m), but it is much greater near the coasts. Desk encyclopedia Our beach was...

In Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game, a renegade IRA man ends up in the arms of a male cross-dresser. It is a typical Post-Modern drift – from politics to perversity, revolution to...

He’s killed his father, don’t know it yet but will. Red hands grip crusts till he has scoffed his fill. The tight cords hurt his body – not his will. Bandit, savage, reiver,...

I was well into Giles Gordon’s Aren’t We Due a Royalty Statement? before I noticed that other readers were taking the book seriously, often to the point of denunciation. Up to then I...

In Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, the young hero, imprisoned in a jail in Mexico and suffering harsh conditions, has a brilliant dream – a dream calling for some very earnest writing...

i Trying to describe a colour by comparison and metaphor is as futile as the attempt to hum the tune I hear in my head. But I thought everyone knew what was meant by sugar-paper blue. Sugar-paper...

At the 1992 MLA convention in New York there were some 12,000 registered and paid-up members in attendance. It is, one is told, the largest function of its kind in North America – and...

Alexander Pope’s talent for inspiring enmity is central to his reputation. His contemporary enemies were impressive in quantity and intensity: J.V. Guerinot’s bibliography of Pamphlet...

‘Serious’ has become a cant word in a literary context, in rather the same way that ‘fine’ (‘she’s a fine person’) is the accepted fallback among clerics...

‘High concept’ is a phrase coined by Hollywood to describe films whose central premise or selling-point is so strong and simple that it can be summed up in a few words: Ivan...

Stalinist, alcoholic, sexually ambivalent, Patrick Hamilton had all the prerequisites of a successful Thirties writer. That his success was uneven would seem simply another sign of the times, the...

Though he had little Latin He seemed to like his title I named him Incitatus Meaning to run swiftly But also to excite, to incite Or so to speak spur on Me they dubbed Baby-Boots I gave him iron...

Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary is a huge grab-bag of a book, probably the least known of all his important works outside Russia – though in this regard his marvellous,...

So for six days he crusadedand on the seventh he flew to Australia. Athletic Park, April 1959: a southerly straight off Cook Strait, the microphone bandaged in gauze. Here in Balclutha there is...

I met Susan Swan, the author of this novel about a girls’ boarding-school, in a women’s dormitory on a holistic holiday in Greece. Apart from Susan, there was Tessa, a potter from...

I first heard of Irvine Welsh about a year ago, on a visit to the house of a friend of mine in Glasgow. This friend and I were talking, as we often do, about whether or not it is possible...

‘I was not myself. I was just anyone.’ The person who says ‘I’ in Michael Hofmann’s earlier poems is uncertain, diffident, angry; he seems both gnarled and youthful,...